Do Evenbake Cake Strips Really Help Bake Perfectly Level Cakes?
Item: Regency Evenbake Cake Strips
Price: $6.99
Overall impression: These insulated strips that attach to the outside of the cake pan do a decent job of baking up level cakes, but we’re still not completely sold.
When a few Kitchn editors got together recently to photograph the Kitchn Baking School, Faith brought me a set of these cake strips since she’d heard so much about them. To be honest, I believe that a good cake recipe has the right amount of leavener and should come out fairly level in the first place, but I was also super curious about these strips that supposedly insulate cake pans to produce moist, level cakes. I wanted to see if they would make a difference.
Regency Evenbake Cake Strips: A Quick Summary
Characteristics and specs:
- Two aluminized fabric strips
- Easy Velcro fasteners
- Fits 8″ to 9″ cake pans
Favorite details: The Velcro made is super easy to attach onto cake pans.
Potential problems: Results weren’t totally consistent. One cake sunk in the middle, while another baked up fairly level.
Who would love this: For those who want to try skipping trimming the tops of cakes before frosting, it’s a small investment worth making.
My Review of the Regency Evenbake Cake Strips
Round One Testing
To use the cake strips, I followed the directions and soaked one in water for 10 minutes first, then squeezed the excess water out. The wet aluminum strips supposedly help to protect the edges of the cake from rising and browning too quickly, and also they’re supposed to help with cracking.
I attached it to one 9″ cake pan; it was easy to attach with the Velcro and stayed snugly on. Once that cake pan was “belted” in, I made my cake batter.
For this test, I used the one-bowl birthday butter cake recipe from The Kitchn Cookbook. Once the batter was made, I poured half of it into a cake pan with the cake strip, and the rest of it into a cake pan with no strip. I wanted to bake them side-by-side to really be able to do a comparison on how well the cake strips performed.
After baking and cooling, here’s a side-by-side view of the cakes out of the pans:
You can definitely see that the cake on the left is flatter on top and browned around the edges. The one on the right, baked with the cake strip, has a dip in the middle and pale sides, but those sides also mean less crumbing action when frosting the cake. The strip definitely did insulate the pan, as evidenced by the lack of browned edges. Still, I definitely did not have a level cake, and actually had a weirdly shaped one instead.
Since I had never made this cake recipe before, I decided to test the strips again, this time with a boxed vanilla cake mix from Trader Joe’s.
Round 2 Testing
This time around, I baked each box mix one at a time so that having two pans in the oven wouldn’t be a factor. I still baked one cake with a cake strip, and the other without.
The result? The cake without the cake strip had a crack on the top and a bit of a bubble in the middle. The cake with the cake strip was much smoother on top, and while generally level, did have the tiniest slope to one side. Much better results this time around.
Conclusion
Although my second cake turned out much better with the use of cake strips, I still didn’t find that it produced a perfectly level cake. I actually don’t mind trimming the tops of cakes since I get to snack on cake scraps, but for those who want to get a bit of a leg up here with level cakes, these cake strips aren’t a huge investment and are worth a try.
Find it! Regency Evenbake Cake Strips, $6.99
Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf.